The fourth voyage and final years

The winter and spring of 1501–02 were exceedingly busy. The four chosen ships were bought, fitted, and crewed, and some 20 of Columbus’s extant letters and memoranda were written then, many in exculpation of Bobadilla’s charges, others pressing even harder the nearness of the Earthly Paradise and the need to reconquer Jerusalem. Columbus took to calling himself “Christbearer” in his letters and to using a strange and mystical signature, never satisfactorily explained. He began also, with all these thoughts and pressures in mind, to compile his Book of Privileges, which defends the titles and financial claims of the Columbus family, and his apocalyptic Book of Prophecies, which includes several biblical passages. The first compilation seems an odd companion to the second, yet both were closely linked in the admiral’s own mind. He seems to have been certain that his mission was divinely guided. Thus, the loftiness of his spiritual aspirations increased as the threats to his personal ones mounted. In the midst of all these efforts and hazards, Columbus sailed from Cádiz on his fourth voyage on May 9, 1502.

Columbus’s sovereigns had lost much of their confidence in him, and there is much to suggest that pity mingled with hope in their support. His four ships contrasted sharply with the 30 granted to the governor Ovando. His illnesses were worsening, and the hostility to his rule in Hispaniola was unabated. Thus, Ferdinand and Isabella forbade him to return there. He was to resume, instead, his interrupted exploration of the “other world” to the south that he had found on his third voyage and to look particularly for gold and the strait to India. Columbus expected to meet the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama in the East, and the sovereigns instructed him on the appropriate courteous behaviour for such a meeting—another sign, perhaps, that they did not wholly trust him. They were right. He departed from Gran Canaria on the night of May 25, made landfall at Martinique on June 15 (after the fastest crossing to date), and was, by June 29, demanding entrance to Santo Domingo on Hispaniola. Only on being refused entry by Ovando did he sail away to the west and south. From July to September 1502 he explored the coast of Jamaica, the southern shore of Cuba, Honduras, and the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua. His feat of Caribbean transnavigation, which took him to Bonacca Island off Cape Honduras on July 30, deserves to be reckoned on a par, as to difficulty, with that of crossing the Atlantic, and the admiral was justly proud of it. The fleet continued southward along Costa Rica. Constantly probing for the strait, Columbus sailed round the Chiriquí Lagoon (in Panama) in October; then, searching for gold, he explored the Panamanian region of Veragua (Veraguas) in the foulest of weather. In order to exploit the promising gold yield he was beginning to find there, the admiral in February 1503 attempted to establish a trading post at Santa María de Belén on the bank of the Belén (Bethlehem) River under the command of Bartholomew Columbus. However, Indian resistance and the poor condition of his ships (of which only two remained, fearfully holed by shipworm) caused him to turn back to Hispaniola. On this voyage disaster again struck. Against Columbus’s better judgment, his pilots turned the fleet north too soon. The ships could not make the distance and had to be beached on the coast of Jamaica. By June 1503 Columbus and his crews were castaways.

Columbus had hoped, as he said to his sovereigns, that “my hard and troublesome voyage may yet turn out to be my noblest”; it was in fact the most disappointing of all and the most unlucky. In its explorations the fleet had missed discovering the Pacific (across the isthmus of Panama) and failed to make contact with the Maya of Yucatán by the narrowest of margins. Two of the men—Diego Méndez and Bartolomeo Fieschi, captains of the wrecked ships La Capitana and Vizcaíno, respectively—left about July 17 by canoe to get help for the castaways; although they managed to traverse the 450 miles (720 km) of open sea to Hispaniola, Ovando made no great haste to deliver that help. In the meantime, the admiral displayed his acumen once again by correctly predicting an eclipse of the Moon from his astronomical tables, thus frightening the local peoples into providing food; but rescuers did not arrive until June 1504, and Columbus and his men did not reach Hispaniola until August 13 of that year. On November 7 he sailed back to Sanlúcar and found that Queen Isabella, his main supporter, had made her will and was dying.

Columbus always maintained that he had found the true Indies and Cathay in the face of mounting evidence that he had not. Perhaps he genuinely believed that he had been there; in any event, his disallowances of the “New World” hindered his goals of nobility and wealth and dented his later reputation. Columbus had been remote from his companions and intending colonists, and he had been a poor judge of the ambitions, and perhaps the failings, of those who sailed with him. This combination proved damaging to almost all of his hopes. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to suppose that Columbus spent his final two years wholly in illness, poverty, and oblivion. His son Diego was well established at court, and the admiral himself lived in Sevilla in some style. His “tenth” of the gold diggings in Hispaniola, guaranteed in 1493, provided a substantial revenue (against which his Genoese bankers allowed him to draw), and one of the few ships to escape a hurricane off Hispaniola in 1502 (in which Bobadilla himself went down) was that carrying Columbus’s gold. He felt himself ill-used and shortchanged nonetheless, and these years were marred, for both him and King Ferdinand, by his constant pressing for redress. Columbus followed the court from Segovia to Salamanca and Valladolid, attempting to gain an audience. He knew that his life was nearing its end, and in August 1505 he began to amend his will. He died on May 20, 1506. First he was laid in the Franciscan friary in Valladolid, then taken to the family mausoleum established at the Carthusian monastery of Las Cuevas in Sevilla. In 1542, by the will of his son Diego, Columbus’s bones were laid with his own in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo, Hispaniola (now in the Dominican Republic). After Spain ceded Hispaniola to France, the remains were moved to Havana, Cuba, in 1795 and returned to Sevilla in 1898. In 1877, however, workers at the cathedral in Santo Domingo claimed to have found another set of bones that were marked as those of Columbus. Since 1992 these bones have been interred in the Columbus Lighthouse (Faro a Colón).

Principal evidence of travels

Remains

There are few material remains of Columbus’s travels. Efforts to find the Spaniards’ first settlement on Hispaniola have so far failed, but the present-day fishing village of Bord de Mer de Limonade (near Cap-Haïtien, Haiti) may be close to the original site, and a Taino chieftain’s settlement has been identified nearby. Concepción de la Vega, which Columbus founded on the second voyage, may be the present La Vega Vieja, in the Dominican Republic. Excavations at the site of La Isabela were still ongoing in the early 21st century, as were those at Sevilla la Nueva, Jamaica, where Columbus’s two caravels were beached on the fourth voyage. The techniques of skeletal paleopathology and paleodemography were applied with some success to determine the fates of the native populations.

Written sources

The majority of the surviving primary sources about Columbus are not private diaries or missives; instead, they were intended to be read by other people. There is, then, an element of manipulation about them—a fact that must be borne fully in mind for their proper understanding. Foremost among these sources are the journals written by Columbus himself for his sovereigns—one for the first voyage, now lost though partly reconstructed; one for the second, almost wholly gone; and one for the third, which, like the first, is accessible through reconstructions made by using later quotations. Each of the journals may be supplemented by letters and reports to and from the sovereigns and their trusted officials and friends, provisioning decrees from the sovereigns, and, in the case of the second voyage, letters and reports of letters from fellow voyagers (especially Michele da Cuneo, Diego Alvarez Chanca, and Guillermo Coma). There is no journal and only one letter from the fourth voyage, but a complete roster and payroll survive from this, alone of all the voyages; in addition, an eyewitness account survives that has been plausibly attributed to Columbus’s younger son, Ferdinand, who traveled with the admiral. Further light is thrown upon the explorations by the so-called Pleitos de Colón, judicial documents concerning Columbus’s disputed legacy. A more recent discovery is a copybook that purportedly contains five narrative letters and two personal ones from Columbus, all previously unknown, as well as additional copies of two known letters—all claimed as authentic. Supplemental narratives include The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus, which has been attributed to Ferdinand Columbus, the Historia de los Reyes Católicos (c. 1500) of Andrés Bernáldez (a friend of Columbus and chaplain to the archbishop of Sevilla), and the Historia de las Indias, which was compiled about 1550–63 by Bartolomé de Las Casas (former bishop of Chiapas and a champion of the indigenous people of the Americas).

Columbus’s intentions and presuppositions may be better understood by examining the few books still extant from his own library. Some of these were extensively annotated, often by the admiral and sometimes by his brother Bartholomew, including copies of the Imago mundi by the 15th-century French theologian Pierre d’Ailly (a compendium containing a great number of cosmological and theological texts), the Historia rerum ubique gestarum of Pope Pius II, published in 1477, the version of The Travels of Marco Polo known as the De consuetudinibus et condicionibus orientalium regionum of Francesco Pipino (1483–85), Alfonso de Palencia’s late 15th-century Castilian translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, and the humanist Cristoforo Landino’s Italian translation of the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. Other books known to have been in Columbus’s possession are the Guide to Geography of the ancient astronomer and geographer Ptolemy, the Catholicon of the 15th-century encyclopaedist John of Genoa, and a popular handbook to confession, the Confessionale produced by the Dominican St. Antoninus of Florence. The whole shows that the admiral was adept in Latin, Castilian, and Italian, if not expert in all three. He annotated primarily in Latin and Spanish, very rarely in Italian. He had probably already read and annotated at least the first three named texts before he set out on his first voyage to the “Indies.” Columbus was a deeply religious and reflective man as well as a distinguished seaman, and, being largely self-taught, he had a reverence for learning, perhaps especially the learning of his most influential Spanish supporters. A striking manifestation of his sensibilities is the Book of Prophecies, a collection of pronouncements largely taken from the Bible and seeming to bear directly on his role in the western voyages; the book was probably compiled by Columbus and his friend the Carthusian friar Gaspar Gorricio between September 1501 and March 1502, with additions until circa 1505.

Calculations

Contrary to common lore, Columbus’s contemporaries never thought that the world was flat. Educated Europeans had known that the Earth was spherical in shape since at least the early 7th century, when the popular Etymologies of St. Isidore of Sevilla were produced in Spain. Columbus’s miscalculations, such as they were, lay in other areas. First, his estimate of the sea distance to be crossed to Cathay was wildly inaccurate. Columbus rejected Ptolemy’s estimate of the journey from West to East overland, substituting a far longer one based on a chart (now lost) supplied by the Florentine mathematician and geographer Paolo Toscanelli, and on Columbus’s preference for the calculations of the Classical geographer Marinus of Tyre. Additionally, Columbus’s reading primarily of the 13th–14th-century Venetian Marco Polo’s Travels gave him the idea that the lands of the East stretched out far around the back of the globe, with the island of Cipango—itself surrounded by islands—located a further 1,500 miles (2,400 km) from the mainland of Cathay. He seems to have argued that this archipelago might be near the Azores. Columbus also read the seer Salathiel-Ezra in the books of Esdras, from the Apocrypha (especially 2 Esdras 6:42, in which the prophet states that the Earth is six parts land to one of water), thus reinforcing these ideas of the proportion of land- to sea-crossing. The mistake was further compounded by his idiosyncratic view of the length of a degree of geographic latitude. The degree, according to Arabic calculators, consisted of 562/3 Arab miles, and an Arab mile measured 6,481 feet (1,975.5 metres). Given that a nautical mile measures 6,076 feet (1,852 metres), this degree amounts to approximately 60.45 nautical miles (112 km). Columbus, however, used the Italian mile of 4,847 feet (1,477.5 metres) for his computations and thus arrived at approximately 45 nautical miles (83 km) to a degree. This shortened the supposed distance across the sea westward to such an extent that Zaiton, Marco Polo’s great port of Cathay, would have lain a little to the east of present-day San Diego, California, U.S.; also, the islands of Cipango would have been about as far north of the Equator as the Virgin Islands—close to where Columbus actually made his landfalls. (See alsoSidebar: Measuring the Earth, Classical and Arabic.)

The miscalculation of distance may have been willful on Columbus’s part and made with an eye to his sponsors. The first journal suggests that Columbus may have been aware of his inaccuracy, for he consistently concealed from his sailors the great number of miles they had covered, lest they become fearful for the journey back. Such manipulations may be interpreted as evidence of bravery and the need to inspire confidence rather than of simple dishonesty or error.

Legacy

The debate about Columbus’s character and achievements began at least as early as the first rebellion of the Taino Indians and continued with Roldán, Bobadilla, and Ovando. It has been revived periodically (notably by Las Casas and Jean-Jacques Rousseau) ever since. The Columbus quincentenary of 1992 rekindled the intensity of this early questioning and redirected its aims, often with insightful results. The word “encounter” is now preferred to “discovery” when describing the contacts between Europe and the Americas, and more attention has been paid to the fate of indigenous Americans and to the perspectives of non-Christians. Enlightening discoveries have been made about the diseases that reached the New World through Columbus’s agency as well as those his sailors took back with them to the Old. The pendulum may, however, have swung too far. Columbus has been blamed for events far beyond his own reach or knowledge, and too little attention has been paid to the historical circumstances that conditioned him. His obsessions with lineage and imperialism, his zealous religious beliefs, his enslaving of indigenous peoples, and his execution of colonial subjects come from a world remote from that of modern democratic ideas, but it was the world to which he belonged. The forces of European expansion, with their slaving and search for gold, had been unleashed before him and were quite beyond his control; he simply decided to be in their vanguard. He succeeded. Columbus’s towering stature as a seaman and navigator, the sheer power of his religious convictions (self-delusory as they sometimes were), his personal magnetism, his courage, his endurance, his determination, and, above all, his achievements as an explorer should continue to be recognized.